


The Chocolate Factory

by ignipes



Category: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Harry Potter - Rowling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-07-09
Updated: 2005-07-08
Packaged: 2017-10-02 21:09:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignipes/pseuds/ignipes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After falling through the veil in the Department of Mysteries, Sirius Black wakes up in a most unexpected place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Somewhere in a large city, in a tired rundown neighbourhood with boarded-up windows and flickering streetlamps, there is an abandoned factory.

It is a very old factory. Almost nobody in the city remembers when it was built, or what it used to make, or why it stopped. Most people think it is a very ugly factory, large and hulking and dark behind its great iron gate, with far too many smokestacks and sharp corners. It isn't shiny and glassy like new factories, and it never has been. The people in the neighbourhood are used to dirty, ugly things, but they try not to look at the old factory when they ride the bus past on their way to other parts of the city.

Every few years, a man or a woman in a suit and sensible shoes will drive a shiny car into the neighbourhood, pretending not to see all the grime and rubbish, to make notes and take photographs. These notes usually contain words like 'eyesore' and 'health hazard', and the photographs usually zoom in on the windows broken by neighbourhood schoolboys, the naughty words spray-painted on the walls, the crooked smokestacks that haven't smoked in decades, the weeds pushing through the concrete. People will talk about the cost of the land and hopeful things like 'revival' and 'development'.

But other words like 'zoning' and 'grandfather clause' and 'cost-benefit ratio' always creep into the conversations, too, and the man or woman eventually goes away, leaving the neighbourhood unchanged and the factory in silence.

Almost nobody in the neighbourhood remembers when the factory belched smoke from its stacks, but a few people do.

A few old men and women walk by the great iron gate each day, going to and from wherever it is old people go in neighbourhoods like this.

And they remember.

They slow down as they near the gate, and then they stop.

They look around to see that nobody is watching and no young hoodlums are waiting to throw bottles or rocks.

They close their eyes.

And they breathe in a great, big, hearty gulp, swallowing the air as if they can taste it, as if there is nothing they would rather do than just stand on the street and breathe.

Sometimes, when the wind is right and the day is not too hot, they can smell something just a bit sweeter, just a bit warmer, just a bit _better_ than all the smog and gasoline and garbage that fill the air.

Then the old men and women of the neighbourhood open their eyes, feeling silly, and check again to see that no one is watching. They keep walking, going about their business, breathing normally again because they know they have to.

Sometimes they smile, but the smiles are always sad.

-

Sirius Black woke up sneezing.

He sneezed violently eight or nine times before his brain caught up with his nose and realised that something wasn't right.

He was lying on a cold, hard floor; his neck and limbs were stiff from prolonged stillness; his mouth had the foul taste that came from hours of sleep.

_No. Not here._

There was no sound, not the faintest whimper or breath, not the slightest insidious rustle of fabric.

_No._

His hands clenched and he struggled to breath normally, to stifle the panicked gasps building in his chest. It was the silence of early morning, of exhaustion and weariness and minds too broken to fight--

_No. Not here. Not again._

Sirius opened his eyes.

Blue. Dust. Blue, faint green, dust, tile. Cautiously, Sirius looked from side to side, wincing at the pain that rumbled through his head. A long corridor stretched to either side, wide and seemingly endless, vanishing into murky shadows. In front of him, set in a smooth pale blue wall, was a narrow door. On the door, there were words in fading black paint:

  
**FORBIDDEN  
DO NOT   
UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES  
FOR ANY REASON  
AT ANY TIME  
WITH ANY EXCUSE  
ENTER  
EVER  
OR YOU WILL BE SORRY**   


Relief mingled with confusion washed over Sirius. He exhaled a huff of quiet laughter. He pushed the panic from his mind and sat up, rubbing his neck to relieve some of the stiffness. He was probably just lost somewhere in the Ministry. Everybody knew there were hundreds of old rooms and corridors that nobody used anymore--

_The Ministry._

Panic returned, sharp and icy.

_The Ministry. Department of Mysteries. Death Eaters. Bellatrix. A red flash--_

Harry.

"Harry!" Sirius scrambled to his feet, looking around frantically. "Harry!"

His voice echoed through the corridor, bounding off the walls, reverberating into the darkness. It faded to a distant whisper--

_arry arry arry_

\--then it was gone. Dust swirled like phantoms, and through the dancing cloud Sirius saw his wand lying on the floor.

Very slowly, he bent to pick it up, resisting the urge to call out again. A voice in his mind scolded him: _Be sensible. Think. For once in your bloody life,_ think_ before you fly off._

"Oh, shut it," Sirius growled, then sneezed again.

Sensible. He could do that.

"Yes, I can," he retorted when the voice in his mind expressed mild disbelief.

Looking to the left and right, seeing nothing but dancing dust and pale blue light, he reached out and tried to the handle of the FORBIDDEN door. It was, of course, locked. Gripping his wand in his sweaty palm, Sirius pointed and said, sternly, "_Alohomora_." The lock did not respond. He tried another Unlocking Charm, and another, and another, steadily and patiently working through his entire repertoire of Unlocking Charms -- which was quite extensive -- but the door and lock didn't so much as jiggle.

_Maybe it's FORBIDDEN for a reason._

"Why, thank you for that clever contribution." Sirius lowered his wand and sighed.

The corridor was identical on either side. The walls and tiles were a faded bluish-green colour, blanketed with dust and faintly lit by some unknown source. There were no other doors in the walls, no sign that anything had disturbed the dust for ages. Sirius turned to the left and started walking.

After five steps, he stopped.

He turned back, pointed his wand at the door, and said firmly, "_Insere Ariadne_." The words swarmed through the corridor, a gentle echo, like autumn leaves on an empty road.

A thin shimmering gold thread shot from the end of his wand and snaked over to the door, attaching itself to the handle with a neat bow. Sirius took a few more steps. Glancing back, he saw the that thread was growing rapidly from his wand, floating on the air in the empty corridor, a warm sparkle of magic glowing through the gloom and churned-up dust.

Satisfied, he quickened his pace. There were, after all, only so many places he could be. The Ministry of Magic was big, but it wasn't infinite. He didn't know where he was going, but he felt a determined eagerness to get there as quickly as possible.

_Typical_.

"Shut it," he said.

The corridor replied: _it it it it._

-

When Sirius reached the first branch in the corridor, he turned right without hesitation.

Then left.

Then left again.

Then right.

Left, right, right, left.

There seemed to be no end to the number of passageways and corridors spreading out on every side, and he quickly lost track of how many turns he made. There was nothing to distinguish any corridor from any of the others, so he loped along, his eyes sharp for any door, any sign, any change, anything at all.

Ariadne's Thread spun out behind him with a soft whistling noise, and his shoes slapped on the tile floor, stirring up dust with every step, but there was no other sound. The passages sloped downward, gently at first, then more steeply. Sirius noticed a slight change in the air; it was a bit warmer, and there was a faint smell, something sweet and familiar that he couldn't quite name. There were no windows and very few doors; he tried each, but they were all shut stubbornly against his magic, and he had no tools to employ his long out-of-practice lock-picking skills. The doors had once been labelled, but he could make out only a few letters here and there, not nearly enough to tell him where he was.

Before long, Sirius lost patience with the endless identical corridors. He didn't have time to be running, utterly lost and confused, in this senseless underground labyrinth. Somewhere -- _somewhere_ \-- Harry and Remus and Dora and everyone else were fighting. Or they had been, hours ago, and here he was, stuck in these tunnels like a rabbit, no idea how to get out, no idea where to go to help them, and not even certain anymore that this was the Ministry--

Abruptly, the corridor ended.

Before him was a great metal door. It was dirty and rusted, with long reddish-brown stains running down its surface and rough flecks on the hinges, but Sirius could see that it had once been polished to a gleam. Through the grime and rust, he could just make out a line of faded letters that had probably once been silver:

  
**TH CH C LA E OM**   


Without much hope, Sirius put his hand on the elegantly curved door-handle and twisted.

The handle turned. Something within the massive door _clanked_.

The door swung away from him slowly, opening with an ear-shattering _screeeeech_ that made his teeth hurt and his hair stand up on end. The metallic shriek exploded into the room beyond the door, echoing madly from distant walls.

Sirius peered suspiciously into the darkness, his heart beating rapidly. When the echoes faded there was no other sound, no indication that anybody had been roused by the racket. Swallowing and taking a deep breath, he stepped through the door, raising his wand to light the way.

The moment he passed the threshold, however, the room was filled with soft yellow light; it seemed to glow from the very walls.

Sirius stopped and stared.

His mouth fell open. His mouth closed.

He said, "Holy mother of Merlin."

His voice echoed: _lin lin lin lin._

He was standing at the edge of a tremendous cavern, a sweeping _valley_ \-- there was no better word for it -- bigger than a dozen Quidditch pitches, sloping down toward a dark, dry riverbed at the bottom. A skeletal forest of charred, spindly trees lined the riverbanks, with not a single leaf among them. All around there were huge empty areas that looked like barren winter fields. A cliff of dark stone interrupted the river, and from its base a complicated tangle of glass pipes climbed into the ceiling, every one of them stained and smudged and dry as a bone.

Sirius took a few tentative steps forward. The dead grass crackled; he looked down. It wasn't grass at all, but tiny crystals, crunching and shattering under his shoes.

Gingerly, he descended to the riverbed, gaping open-mouthed at the enormous lifeless valley. The air in the cavern was warm and heavy, filled with the same sickly-sweet scent Sirius had smelled in the corridors, but stronger now, almost stifling, and the silence was oppressive. It wasn't just quiet, he thought, slipping suddenly on a patch of glassy-smooth ground. It was _empty_. It was -- it was missing something.

"Don't be daft," Sirius grumbled to himself. But his heart was beating just a bit too quickly, and he caught himself glancing over his shoulder, looking warily back toward the open metal door.

Sirius walked along the riverbed for a ways. The ground was oddly slippery, with a faint oily sheen beneath a thin crust. Dead bulrushes lined the riverbank, and mired in one huge cluster there was a boat -- of sorts. It appeared to be made of bright red glass, but it had been lying on its side for so long it had begun to seep into the riverbed. It was now oddly slumped and misshapen. Sirius ran his hand along the upturned hull. It was sticky to the touch, like a hard sweet left in the sun for too long.

Sirius paused, looking at his fingers thoughtfully. He inhaled slowly. Such a familiar scent, beneath the dankness and dust -- warm, gentle, comfortable.

He licked his fingers thoughtfully.

"Cherry," he said aloud. "That is very odd."

Sirius knelt down, poked a finger into the soft riverbed, then licked it experimentally.

"And that," he added, "is even odder."

Chocolate. A bit mouldy, a bit stale, but chocolate nonetheless, rich and dark and sweet.

Crouched on the chocolate riverbed, his elbows resting on his knees, Sirius thought of the letters on the great metal door. _The Chocolate Room_.

_I don't think you're in the Ministry anymore, Padfoot._

"Scintillating observation, mate." He stood up, wiping his fingers on his robes. "Now, where--"

Then he saw the footprints.


	2. Chapter 2

Footprints meandered down the riverbed. There were several tracks, wandering this way and that, some quite fresh and others older: soft, fading, melting into the riverbed. They were all from the same pair of shoes; Sirius was pleased with himself for noticing the jagged line in the heel of each left imprint. Constant vigilance, indeed.

Sirius set his own foot into one of the prints, then turned downriver, looking ahead to where the broad expanse of dried chocolate vanished around a bend. A single man had walked this river countless times, up toward the waterfall -- _chocolatefall_, Sirius corrected, smiling at the word -- then down again.

With a shrug, Sirius pocketed his wand and began to follow the footprints. The river narrowed downstream, and after a few minutes Sirius saw a great gaping tunnel ahead, a round dark mouth in the wall of the cavern. No light glowed from within, and a cool breeze brushed across his face when he stood at the entrance to the tunnel.

He drew his wand again and whispered, "_Lumos_," holding it high to see into the darkness.

The tunnel looked like a massive pipe, with a curved white ceiling overhead and mud -- _chocolate_ \-- splashed high on the sides. The air was livelier in the tunnel, less stale and heavy, and Sirius thought he could almost hear -- _something_. Something that moved, or breathed, or--

He shook his head quickly. It was just air moving through the giant pipe. Probably.

Sirius took a few steps forward, then paused. The blue wandlight bobbed on the tunnel walls, lapping hesitantly at the gloom ahead.

"Forward, you plonker," Sirius chided himself loudly. "It's the only way of knowing--"

The breeze from the tunnel strengthened, catching his voice and throwing it back at him.

_knowing_

going

rowing

flowing

"Forward," he said again, this time in a whisper. He started walking.

In the glow of his wandlight he saw doors set into the wall high above the bottom of the pipe. Most were splashed with chocolate, as if a great flood had swept through the tunnel. But he could still make out the faded writing on some of them: STOREROOM NUMBER 23 GUMMY BEARS, GUMMY WORMS, GUMMY TOADS, AND GUMMY CATS. STOREROOM NUMBER 54 ALL THE CREAMS.

Sirius shook his head with wonder. STOREROOM NUMBER 59 ALAS POOR NOUGAT. A sweets factory. He had fallen through some archway in the Department of Mysteries and ended up in a bloody _sweets_ factory. He wondered if the Unspeakables knew about this place. STOREROOM NUMBER 62 PEPPERMINT, SPEARMINT, AND PHILADELPHIA MINT. But even if they did know, who would believe them? They were supposed to study great mysteries and wonders. Time, Death, Thought, Love, that sort of thing. Important things.

Sirius had been away from the world for a long time, but he was fairly certain that Chocolate was not yet on the list of Life's Greatest Mysteries. (_Well, it should be_, said a voice in his head that sounded suspiciously like Remus Lupin, _along with Tea and Whisky and Songs About Pirates._)

The storeroom doors were too high for him to reach, and a few simple spells revealed that were locked, anyway, in the same strange magical manner as all the doors in the corridors had been. The Ministry of Magic, Sirius reflected, could learn a few tricks about security from the sweets manufacturing industry.

Several paces after STOREROOM NUMBER 71 WHIPS -- ALL SHAPES AND SIZES \-- he devoted a few extra moments to trying to open that door -- Sirius saw a soft light shining into the tunnel. He lowered his wand and whispered, "_Nox_," edging forward cautiously. Against the side of the pipe, crates, boxes and barrels were piled up in a crooked staircase; warm yellow light and quiet music spilled out of a half-open door at the top.

He hesitated at the bottom of the makeshift staircase, listening to the faint music. It was tinny and scratchy, like one of Remus' old records. Sirius recognised the song -- a husky-voiced woman, low and slow and sad -- but he couldn't recall the name.

There probably somebody up there. A man with a jagged cut in the heel of his left shoe. A man who liked old jazz. A man who wandered up and down a dry chocolate river, but never ventured into the dusty maze of corridors.

_Brilliant detective work, Black,_ Sirius thought ruefully. _You've deduced absolutely nothing useful._

Sirius took one more look up and down the dark tunnel, regripped his wand, and climbed the makeshift staircase. At the top, he paused to read the writing on the faded red door. Unlike the words on all the other doors Sirius had seen, these were bold and dark, freshly touched-up with glossy black paint.

  
**INVENTING ROOM  
PRIVATE  
KEEP OUT**   


He pushed the door open and stepped inside.

The room was filled with massive iron stoves and strange machines, with pipes and pots and pans piled in every corner, from ceiling to floor. Panels with buttons and levers and dials covered the walls, with faded labels and dark electronic displays. Glass tubing and wires twisted like worms across wide tables; vials and beakers were balanced in precarious piles. The odours of burnt sugar and smoke permeated the room, but they were old smells, seeping from the woodwork and the walls rather than fresh fires. There was no sound except for the scratchy music coming from an old gramophone set on one of the wooden benches. None of the stoves were lit; none of the pipes steamed; none of the cauldrons bubbled.

Sirius walked slowly through the jumble, peering around the tables and machines in amazement. It looked like the laboratory of some mad witch, the sort who never had any eyebrows and kept far more kneazles than was strictly sanitary. He stared at one gigantic contraption in the centre of the room, a gleaming metal monstrosity with hundreds of glass tubes sprouting from the top. The tubes were streaked with dried gunk of every imaginable colour, blending together into a rather unappetizing brown crust that lined a large vat.

Sirius was vaguely glad that he had never known the secrets of the Honeydukes' sweets he'd devotedly consumed as a child. If this Inventing Room was any indication, he didn't want to know just where the sweets makers came up with Liquorice Lizards and Skunk Spogs. He didn't want to know that the awful stories he used to make up to convince Regulus to part with his sweets had some element of truth in them.

He poked experimentally at one saucepan, watching the green contents squish down and spring back, and continued around the other side of the huge machine.

There he saw the man.

The man was sitting so still and quiet it took a moment for Sirius to realise that he was a real person and not just another dusty relic. He was quite thin, and though he was sitting on a stool Sirius could see that he was tall, as well. His head of thin, wispy white hair was bent low over something on the table; he was holding a pen in one hand but he didn't seem to be writing. His clothes were peculiar -- even, Sirius thought, for a wizard dressed in Muggle clothing -- a crimson smoking jacket, a bright yellow neck-cloth, green plaid trousers.

While Sirius watched, the man reached up, adjusted his thick spectacles, then looked down at his notebook and wrote a few words. Then he stopped and stared into space again, completely unaware of Sirius standing just a few feet away.

Sirius waited.

The old man wrote a few more words, then stopped.

Sirius cleared his throat.

Slowly, without the least start or indication of surprise, the man turned and looked at Sirius.

"Why, hello, lad," he said. His voice was soft and hoarse, as though he hadn't used it in a long time. His blue eyes blinked owlishly behind thick glasses.

"Um. Hello."

The man blinked again, waiting.

Sirius had never paid much attention to his mother's etiquette lessons when he was a kid, and he doubted that _Barquentine's Pureblood Manners and Mores_ covered this situation anyway, but he was really quite uncertain how to continue.

He said, "I came through the tunnel." It was as good an introduction as any.

"Ah, yes." The old man pushed his glasses up his nose. There was another long pause, and when he spoke again, his voice was curiously empty, as though he were reciting a memory rather than paying attention to his own words. "The river. Magnificent piece of geography, isn't it?"

"It is quite...impressive," Sirius agreed warily. "But where, exactly--"

"There is nothing quite like it in the world. Why, you could search the four corners of the globe and the seven seas and you would never find a river like it. No, sir, there is only one River of Chocolate, and it is here."

"Yes, but where--"

"Of course, things aren't quite the same as they used to be. It's been some time since the last Spring flood. Oh, how I used to love the Spring floods. Would you like to sit down?"

"I -- what?"

The man motioned to another stool. "Please, sit down. Are you hungry? You look a bit peaked. It isn't healthy, you know, for young men like yourself to stay out of the sun so much. Young limbs need sun and air to grow! You are much too pale. You need to be in your best condition to make the most of this place. Yes, sir. That you do."

Sirius bit back his initial response -- _not my bloody fault, is it, you pasty old codger_ \--and sat on the edge of the stool. "Yes, yes, I know," he said impatiently, "but what _is_ this place, exactly?"

The old man blinked again, and this time his eyes fixed on Sirius with a sharp, canny gaze. "Why, don't you know? Everybody knows."

"No," Sirius said, as calmly as possible. "I don't know."

"But _everybody_ knows." The old man seemed truly bewildered. "It is impossible not to know, young man. Inconceivable."

Sirius inhaled slowly. _Just pretend to be Remus,_ he told himself. _Patience. Politeness._ "Let's say I don't know," he said lightly. Then, inspired by the man's American accent, he added, "I'm foreign. And I'm lost. I have no idea where I am." Wasn't that something an American would have no trouble believing?

"Oh. Oh, dear."

Another long silence. Sirius contemplated various motivational hexes and curses.

Then, with the manner of one making a momentous announcement, the old man straightened his thin shoulders and said, "Young man, this is the Chocolate Factory."

Sirius blinked. "_Which_ chocolate factory...precisely?"

The old man's shoulders straightened even further, and his voice grew louder. "This is the largest and most famous chocolate factory in the world! This factory was built by the most amazing, most fantastic, most extraordinary chocolate maker the world has ever seen! This, lad," the old man stared at Sirius, his eyes like twin blowtorches in his wrinkled face, "is Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory."

"Oh." Sirius hesitated; he felt the old man was expecting rather more reaction from him than this. "That's -- that's splendid."

"How," the old man began, raising one bushy white eyebrow, "did you come to be here if you don't know where you are?"

"I fell," Sirius said, then paused, wondering which details the man could do without.

"That was quite careless of you."

"I -- well -- yes," Sirius agreed, nodding. "It was. But I think--" He thought of the Department of Mysteries, what the Order had learned about it whilst they were making their plans, so many months ago. "I think they think I'm dead," he finished quietly, turning the thought over in his mind for the first time since he'd awoken.

The old man said nothing.

"Can you tell me how to find the way out?"

Still, the old man said nothing.

Sirius felt his temper rise. "I didn't _mean_ to come here," he snapped, standing up and taking a few steps away. "I still don't even know where _here_ is. And as nice as it--"

"If I knew," the old man said, "I would gladly tell you."

"--I don't really want -- what?" Sirius whirled around and stared at the man. "If you -- you mean -- you don't _know_ the way out?"

The old man laughed, but there was no humour in the sound. "Oh, I know the way out. To the surface and through the front gate, of course! Why, there's probably still a red carpet waiting. But I don't know _how_ to get out."

"But if you know the way--"

"The factory won't let me."

There was a long, horrible pause.

In the silence, Sirius could almost hear the factory agreeing, a heavy, breathless, motionless _waiting_. It wasn't alive and it wasn't menacing, no more than a mountain could be alive or menacing, but it was _there_.

"But -- it's your factory, isn't it?" Sirius looked around the cluttered laboratory, suddenly quite aware of all the buttons and blank displays staring, lifelessly, from the machinery.

"Yes," the man sighed. "It is my factory."

"You're Mister--" _What was that name again?_ "--Mister Wonky?"

The man sighed again, and it was like watching him deflate. His shoulders sagged, his head dropped, he dropped the pen and his gnarled hands fell to the wooden tabletop.

"No," he said. His voice was so soft that Sirius had to lean forward to hear. "I'm Charlie Bucket. I'm the one who let the chocolate factory die."


	3. Chapter 3

Sirius opened his mouth to reply -- _that's ridiculous, a factory can't die_ \-- but Charlie Bucket spoke first. "Do you think that is mad? Impossible? Absurd?" He stood up abruptly, unfolding his long frame and pushing his glasses up his nose. "Do you think a thing needs to be living for it to be _alive_?"

Sirius shut his mouth. Somewhere in the room, the record player had reached the end of the album but was still spinning with a steady _scritch, scritch, scritch_. He thought about Hogwarts, towers and ramparts of stone, and he thought about his parents' house on Grimmauld Place. He said, simply, "No. No, I don't."

Charlie Bucket glanced at him, then _hmphed_ and began patting the pockets of his crimson jacket, looking around with a slight frown. "Come, now," he said, snatching up a walking stick and poking it at Sirius like a sword. "There is something I want to show you."

He led Sirius through the cluttered Inventing Room to an open door at the back. It led into a wide corridor, indistinguishable from those Sirius had seen elsewhere in the factory. Charlie hurried through the hallway, his shoulders stooped, his footsteps and walking stick tapping on the tile floor. Sirius tried to ask him where they were going, what they were doing, what the hell was going on anyway, but Charlie Bucket did no more than look back at him once or twice and say nothing. He moved remarkably fast for an old man; Sirius barely had time to read the labels on the doors, much less test the locks. THE NUT ROOM. THE TAFFY ROOM. THE VANILLA ROOM. None of them looked like a way out, but he grew increasingly impatient and frustrated with each new turn.

Charlie Bucket did not even glance at any of the closed doors as they passed. Finally, after countless twists and turns through the pale blue corridors, he stopped in front of one door that had nothing written on it at all. With his hand on the doorknob, he turned to Sirius and tilted his head to one side.

"This used to be the greatest chocolate factory in the world." He spoke almost plaintively, as if asking Sirius to believe him. "And he gave it to me, do you know? Just like that. 'The factory is yours, Charlie Bucket.' It was like a dream. A boy's most cherished childhood dream." He turned the doorknob and pushed the door open a few inches; warm, sweet air and gentle yellow light flowed through the crack. Then, in a voice that was surprisingly loud and stern, he said, "But there's a problem with childhood dreams."

He pushed the door open further and swept his walking stick grandly, motioning Sirius inside. Sirius took a few steps forward, squinting in the brilliant golden light.

The room was large and cubic, as tall as it was wide and long. White and golden tiles covered the ceiling, floor, and walls, without a single smudge or speck of dust, and the room was empty except for a strange contraption in the centre. It looked like an hourglass, a graceful curve of glass large enough for five men to stand inside, stretching from a shallow tiled basin on the floor to an identical basin on the ceiling. There was no sand in the glass. At first Sirius thought it was empty, but as he stepped closer, he saw a brief flickers of movement inside, wisps of smoke in faint pastel colours, dancing in a gentle breeze.

"There's a problem with childhood dreams," Charlie Bucket said again. He stood beside Sirius, leaning heavily on his walking stick and looking up at the hourglass with an expression of mingled sadness and longing. "They always fade."

"What is it?" Sirius asked. He could feel the magic in the room, strong and lively, but there was something odd about it. Something wild, something feral. It felt more like the Forbidden Forest than any magical building he'd ever encountered.

Charlie said, "Watch."

Sirius took another step forward. A whisper in his mind warned him that he ought to be careful, but he ignored it. He reached out tentatively toward the glass, and a swirl of colourful smoke gathered just beyond his fingertips. The knot of smoke writhed and twisted, then slowly began to elongate, stretching until it vaguely resembled the shape of a person. The indistinct blobs sharpened into an old man, older than Charlie, dressed in a threadbare nightshirt and nightcap. As Sirius watched, the old man winked and grinned, then jumped up, waving his arms excitedly and shouting words that Sirius could not hear.

"Who--?" Sirius looked sharply at Charlie Bucket. The man was watching the apparition intently; Sirius was shocked to see tears in his eyes.

He turned back to the magical glass. The old man shimmered unsteadily, then began to divide. One man became two, and the two men split again, each into a man and a woman. The four people laughed and waved delightedly, leaning down as if patting the head of a small child, but their faces were blurred, their edges fading. One by one, they slumped out of their human form, pooling in a pale grey mass in the basin on the floor. Sirius leaned forward, his nose nearly pressed to the glass. _Joseph &amp; Josephine Bucket. Beloved Parents &amp; Grandparents._ Gravestones. The smoke in the hourglass, now completely colourless, was showing him gravestones.

But the image did not last. It quickly changed again, resolving into bouquet of falling flowers, an empty bed, a young women with an alarmingly purple face, a pile of cabbages, a golden ticket, a red boat on a chocolate river, a dozen tiny people staring tight-lipped and silent through the glass, an old man with a top hat and a black goatee, a young man in a cluttered office, his head resting on his arms on the desk.

The images continued to flicker, a dizzying, mesmerising whirl of colour and motion, but Sirius forced himself to look away. "What is it?" he asked again, unwilling to raise his voice above a hoarse whisper. "Is it a Pensieve?"

Charlie Bucket didn't answer immediately. The man with the top hat appeared in the smoke again, leaning on his walking stick, mirroring Charlie's own position.

"He gave it to me, you know," he said after a while, "when I was a boy. He said that only a child could understand what was needed to run the factory. Hundreds of new candies, new kinds of chocolate every day, boxes and boxes and boxes sent to candy stores around the world -- he always said that was magic that only children could understand, and that was the magic that kept the factory alive."

"What happened?"

Charlie Bucket smiled crookedly. "I grew up." He looked upward for a moment, as if listening to a tune only he could hear, then went on. "I began to run the factory. I took care of invoices and shipments, orders and payments. A boy who gazes through the window of a candy shop never knows -- but it is no matter. When he died, he believed he was leaving the factory in good hands. For a long time I believed it, too. Until the chocolate began to change.

"Oh, people still loved it, and they still bought it -- that was what I thought mattered, they were still buying it -- but it wasn't the favourite any more. It wasn't _special_ anymore. And my workers..." Charlie hesitated. In the hourglass, Sirius again saw the silhouettes of dozen still, tiny, silent figures. "I didn't notice when they stopped singing. I didn't notice when they stopped laughing. But I did notice when they left. Perhaps they went back to..." There was a flicker of that crooked smile again. "I never did find it in an atlas."

Sirius shifted his weight impatiently and frowned, considering his response. It was a terribly sad story and quite awful that the old man felt so guilty about it, but none of that helped with the present predicament.

Then, uncomfortably, he wondered just how long this predicament had been 'present' for Charlie Bucket. How long had he been trapped in his own factory? Years? Decades?

"But why can't you leave?" Sirius asked, fighting down the whisper of panic in his chest.

"Don't you understand? The factory won't let me. It's...it's disappointed. It's angry. It wants me to...to _fix_ it."

Sirius didn't reply. In this room, with the brilliant gold and white tiles and the smoke-filled hourglass, it was hard to recall the dark, dusty factory at all. It seemed very far away, a cool, distant memory. Fix it. He wanted to shake his head, scoff, ask if it was really anything that a well-aimed Demolition Hex couldn't fix, but something about the man's earnest expression stopped him.

"So I built this," Charlie explained, waving toward the hourglass with his walking stick. "I thought, if it's childhood dreams and delights the factory wants, why can I not provide? A way to concentrate the memories, to make them _pure_. That's the secret of good chocolate, you know. Concentration and purity. Never even touched by human hands. But the theory, I found, did not quite carry into practice. The fountain does not quite work the way I expected to."

"Fountain? You mean -- a fountain of _youth_?" Sirius stared at Charlie incredulously. "And you thought that would _work_?" He felt the panic rising again, tinged with more than a shade of annoyance. Of course. Of course it was his bloody luck that he got stuck in a decrepit, magical chocolate factory with a madman who thought that building the fountain-of-bloody-_youth_ was the only way out. "That's absurd," Sirius said, shaking his head. He turned away from the hourglass and took a few steps toward the door. "This is bloody ridiculous. There must be a way out."

Charlie looked at him sadly. "We are the music-makers," he said quietly, more to himself than to Sirius, "and we are the dreamers of dreams. But we are quite stuck, I assure you, because the factory -- the chocolate factory is the music, the dream."

"This is ridiculous," Sirius said again, but it sounded weak even to his own ears.

"Yes. I know. We should leave this room, however. If we stay too long, you might see a bit of your childhood, and true memories are never quite as warm as we wish..."

Sirius turned toward him; Charlie's eyes were wide, his mouth open in slight astonishment as he watched the hourglass. Sirius felt a chill roll through him, and he turned slowly, already knowing what he would see.

"Well," he said, his breath catching. "Hello, Mother."

Slender, elegant, well-dressed, beautiful, larger than life, frowning. Even in smoke, shifting and transparent, she was the way he always saw her, even during these past months with her mad portrait. She opened her mouth to speak, and he instinctively cringed.

_This is a trick._

But no sound emerged and she faded, her features dissolving, sharpening, drawing into the thin nose and rigid posture of his father, a wand in one hand and wine goblet in the other.

_You know these memories._

A dark-haired little boy, a tear-streaked face, the remains of a broken vase at his feet.

_You know how they work._

The head of a house-elf rolling down a long corridor.

_You know the walls are still there._

An earnest round face, limp blond hair, watery blue eyes.

_They have been there all along._

A house in wreckage, a veil of red hair, a broken pair of glasses--

"No!"

Sirius stumbled backwards, throwing his hands up in front of his face. He heard somebody speaking, but the words were garbled, lost beneath the panicked roaring in his ears.

_You know this is how they work._

Turning wildly, he groped for the door, glancing back to see the hourglass fill with looming black shapes. He turned away again and pulled on the door, half-expecting it to be locked; it came open easily, though, and he darted into the corridor.

"Wait! Where are you going? There is no way--"

Sirius didn't stop or look back.

_You know the walls were there all along._

He began to run. He shifted smoothly into a large black dog and _ran_, winding through the empty corridors, skidding around corners, running for no purpose but to escape the shadows. He ran even though he knew it was hopeless.

Finally, he found the Inventing Room again, and he slowed long enough to gingerly descend the staircase into the tunnel, quashing the instinctual canine discomfort with unsteady footing. In the tunnel, he ran again, but more slowly, almost relieved for the complete darkness that shrouded him, a warm, steady, unrelieved black until weak light filtered in from the end of the tunnel. He followed the chocolate river bed back to the valley, then slowed to a trot, sniffing along the riverbanks until he found a shadowed place in a copse of dead trees. There, he collapsed, panting, on the crackling, crunching, crystalline ground, and he waited for them to find him.


	4. Chapter 4

The first time it happened, he was alone in the forest. Hogwarts. Hallowe'en. The Fat Lady. He failed. The rat escaped.

His mind roaring with fury and desperation, he slunk into the forest and curled into a hollow at the base of a massive oak. It began to rain after midnight, and the cold water ran down the roots of the trees and muddy slope, seeping through his matted fur. He closed his eyes and did not move.

Even in the forest, the sound his footsteps in the corridors echoed in his ears, with his own rasping breaths, the murmur of the Hallowe'en banquet in the Great Hall, the portraits whispering as he passed. He felt the knife in his hand, saw the Fat Lady's eyes widen with recognition and horror, heard her screams echoing as she fled.

He imagined the rat within his grasp, naked tail and whiskers and familiar round eyes, captured a thousand different times, a thousand different ways.

Eventually, he slept, and he dreamed of darkness and stone.

His dream-mind built the prison cell. He knew every stone block, every crack, every sharp edge on every steel bar, and the creeping darkness of the guards, hovering in the corridors. He knew the low mad moans of the other prisoners, the choking taste of cold porridge and mouldy bread, the itch of the rough blanket on his skin. He knew it was real. He knew there was no escape.

In the morning, the rain had stopped and the sky had cleared; the trees were dripping and the air smelled of decaying leaves and sodden earth. But he did not move from his hiding place beneath the oak. He did not want to encounter the walls again, to shatter the illusion of openness and life.

That was the first time it happened, but it was not the last. No matter where he went, the stone and darkness followed. Warm ocean air became the dementors' cold, foul breath, chased away by Muggle tourists laughing and shouting on the beach. The smooth walls of the cave above Hogsmeade became dark, slimy blocks of stone, shattered by the indignant squawking of a hungry hippogriff. Dark wooden wainscoting and heavy green draperies became rusted steel bars and looming dark shapes, driven back only by a warm body settling on the floor beside him, gentle fingers scratching behind his canine ears, a hoarse, familiar voice murmuring, _Wake up, Pads. You're dreaming. Wake up._

They said that nobody ever escaped from Azkaban prison. Three years after leaving the fortress behind, Sirius knew they were right.

-

He awoke beside a dried chocolate river. He raised his head from his paws, inhaling the stale chocolate scent, looking over the dreary, muted candy landscape.

"That's a neat trick. Can you become any other animals?"

Sirius turned his head quickly. Charlie Bucket was sitting on the crumbled crystalline grass, leaning against a liquorice tree. The old man's legs were stretched before him, crossed at the ankles, and he was holding a small leather book and a Muggle pen.

Shifting back into human form, Sirius answered, "No. Only a dog."

"Still, it's a neat trick. Are you hungry?"

As Charlie spoke the words, Sirius' stomach rumbled for attention. It had been hours -- maybe days? he wasn't certain -- since he'd eaten a sandwich for tea at Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place.

"Yes, I--" Sirius paused, frowning. "What have you been eating all this time you've been--" _trapped_ "--here?"

Charlie Bucket's eyes glinted with pleasure and he smiled, the most cheerful expression Sirius had yet seen on the old man. "Ah! Yes. That was one of our best inventions, if I do say so myself."

He reached in the inside pocket of his crimson jacket and brought out a slender sweet covered in a stripped paper wrapper. He handed it to Sirius.

"Gum?" Sirius examined the red-and-white wrapper doubtfully.

"Not just any gum," Charlie Bucket said. "This is special gum. Gum unlike anything you've ever chewed before!" He leaned forward eagerly. "Go on, go on, try it!"

Sirius unwrapped the gum and folded it into his mouth. He began to chew, slightly worried by the expression on Charlie's face. At first, it tasted like nothing but rubbery, flavourless, slightly stale gum, and he wondered -- not for the first time -- if Charlie Bucket had gone 'round the twist in his years alone in the factory.

Then the texture of the gum changed. Sirius stopped chewing.

"Wonderful, isn't it?" Charlie Bucket was grinning from ear to ear.

"It tastes like--" Sirius chewed a few more times. "Pot roast, with potatoes and carrots and gravy." It was a pot roast so good it would make Molly Weasley weep with envy, and it wasn't just the flavour, either. He felt the food going down his throat, filling his stomach, warming him from the inside out. The last of the gravy vanished, but Sirius kept chewing, and a moment later the flavour changed. "Pie," he said, laughing. "This is bloody brilliant."

"I know," Charlie Bucket said. "One of our better inventions. It took ages to get the formula just right. There was a time when that pie you're enjoying would have turned you into an apple. But by the--" He broke off sharply, and his smile faded. Looking down, Charlie plucked a few pieces of crackling candied grass and tossed them away. "I figured it out eventually, but by then it was too late."

The flavour was gone from the gum, but Sirius continued to chew. Charlie seemed to be lost in thought, the book and pen on his lap forgotten.

"Do you--" Sirius waited until Charlie looked at him. He felt like he was asking permission to poke through the man's house, but he asked anyway. "Do you mind if I look around? For a way out?" When Charlie didn't answer, he went on, "It might -- the factory might treat me differently. Maybe I can find something."

Charlie Bucket shrugged. "Go ahead. Maybe you can find something."

But there was no hope in his voice. He looked away, up the river, and said nothing more.

-

For weeks, Sirius searched for a way out. He travelled through miles of hallways, fought with innumerable locked doors, and, when he remembered to, returned to the chocolate river valley for a meal of stale magical gum and a few hours of sleep. The first several days Sirius spent bombarding all of the external doors with every destructive spell he could think of, as well as kicking, cursing and glowering when he ran out of ideas. But the doors remained stubbornly shut, so he moved on.

Time passed strangely in the chocolate factory. Sirius would spend an afternoon -- or so he thought -- exploring the doors on one dusty corridor, only to return to Charlie's Inventing Room and discover that he'd been gone so long the old man had assumed he had discovered an exit and escaped. Or he would wander for what felt like hours or longer, until he was hungry and exhausted, and find when he returned that Charlie hadn't even finished a pot of tea.

When he asked the old man about it, Charlie only shrugged and said, mournfully, "There is no place on earth like the chocolate factory. No place anywhere."

It didn't seem like much an explanation to Sirius, but he was learning that there were some things about the factory that the old man simply did not know.

The factory was tremendous, a maze of floors, giant storerooms, tiny closets, fascinating laboratories, and silent machinery. He found an entire level of miniature dormitory rooms with doors only as high as his waist, and another level in which every single room was wallpapered with faded, old-fashioned sweets wrappers. He found a room as large as a Quidditch pitch that was filled entirely with peanuts, and a room as small as an Azkaban cell filled with thousands of buttons, dials, switches and levers. In the lowest levels of the factory, Sirius found incinerators and boilers, vats and furnaces, tanks and tunnels. In the highest levels, he wandered through sunrooms and greenhouses, but the plants were dead and the windows opaque, blocking the view of outside. Lodged into the corner of a dark office, Sirius found a large glass box that looked like some sort of magical lift, but the doors would not open and none of the hundreds of buttons were lit.

He explored the entire factory, poking into every dusty corner, peeking down every dark corridor, using every magical and nonmagical lock-picking skill he possessed to wrestle, wrangle, and wrench every door open -- every door, that is, except the one marked FORBIDDEN, the one he had fallen through, which would not open, no matter what he tried. He tested the walls for secret passageways; he crawled through the space above the ceiling tiles; he punched every button and flipped every switch on every instrument panel he could find.

If there were anti-Apparition wards and Protection Charms enclosing the factory, they were unlike any he had ever encountered. He could not find a way through them.

There was no way out of the factory.

Sirius did not give up, but weeks passed, and nothing changed. His initial panic about being trapped in the factory faded, replaced by restlessness and anxiety. Somewhere, he knew, Harry and Remus and all the others were still fighting, still working, still wondering--

Or perhaps they weren't wondering at all. Perhaps they simply believed that he was gone.

"I'm not."

Sirius stood on the edge of the chocolate waterfall, looking over the silent valley. There was no natural light in the depths of the factory, and the valley was always lit like twilight, with a muted glow from some invisible source. The candy shrubs and trees lining the riverbank were spindly shadows. The bed of the river, dark with a slight oily sheen on its surface, was crisscrossed with his footprints and pawprints, the only sign of life in the silent cavern.

"I'm not gone," he said again. His voice fell flat in the stillness.

-

As he ran out of places to explore and spells to try, Sirius began spending more time with Charlie Bucket in the Inventing Room. Boredom and curiosity drove him to pester the old man with questions about making chocolate and inventing sweets. If nothing else, Sirius reasoned, it passed the time and provided him with enough knowledge to give Honeydukes a run for their money if he should ever find himself free again and in need of gainful employment.

At first, Charlie was reluctant to share his secrets, but eventually he began to answer Sirius' questions.

"I haven't invented in a long time," Charlie confided one day, chewing on his dinner of tomato-soup-and-roast-beef-flavoured gum. "I used to have a dozen new ideas a day. New kinds of chocolate, new flavours of candy. A dozen, a hundred, a thousand! But now -- now I haven't had a single new idea in years."

Sirius hesitated, unsure of how to respond. The old man was always lost in memories, reminiscing about how splendid his life had been when the factory was alive. The endless melancholy flashbacks and regrets were a bit tiresome, but Sirius never stopped him. Given the choice between listening to Charlie Bucket's memories and mulling over his own -- well, that wasn't much of a choice at all.

"But today," Charlie continued distractedly, leaning forward and resting his elbows on the workbench, "I was thinking about the dog you become. It reminds me of something we were working on, a long time ago. Nothing permanent, of course, but wouldn't it be fun? One bite and any child could spend a few minutes as a dog or a cat..."

Sirius grinned, thinking of the Weasley twins. "Or a canary."

"A canary, a mouse, a rabbit, a frog!" Charlie Bucket went on, his words quickening. He picked up a pen and began scribbling in his notebook. "It isn't so different from making hair grow, or making skin change, after all, it would only require a few adjustments to the recipe for--"

The factory _groaned_.

Charlie broke off suddenly. He and Sirius both looked up warily, eyeing the trembling tangle of pipes and wires on the ceiling of the Inventing Room. The noise was distant and muffled, but Sirius could feel it: a low, insistent vibration in his bones. It faded quickly, and the factory was silent again.

Charlie's shoulders slumped.

Tentatively, Sirius prompted, "A few adjustments to the recipe...?"

"It doesn't matter," Charlie said. "It was just a foolish idea."

-

Seven days later, it happened again.

The two men were walking alongside the chocolate river. Sirius was listening as Charlie told him how the seasons used to change in the valley. He tried to image the valley in a full candied burst of spring, delicate confectionary flowers lining the river, or in the hush of a white winter, peppermint trees dusted with fine sugar.

"It would get quite cold in the winter," Charlie explained. "A good season for making ice cream, but sometimes our scarves and mittens would stick in the mixture. So we experimented with Season Mints. It was a simple idea, in theory, but we could never get the recipe quite right."

That was the conclusion of many of Charlie's stories. Sirius was beginning to believe that the mysterious Mr. Wonka had spent more time reversing his experimental mishaps than inventing new sweets.

"Season Mints?" he asked, when Charlie did not continue.

"Mints that we could suck on to make us warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Red for winter, green for summer." Charlie looked up the river thoughtfully, a small smile playing on his lips. "They worked, but rather too well, truth be told. The Winter Mints would make you sweat, and the Summer Mints gave you chills so strong your teeth would chatter for hours. We tried mixing them with a Leveling Mint to make the effects less..._pronounced_..." Charlie Bucket laughed suddenly, a simply joyful sound with none of his ordinary bitterness in it. "But there was a mistake and we accidentally mixed one batch with the Levitating Limes. It was an easy mistake, you see. The labels on the vats were very hard to read, and Mr. Wonka had terrible handwriting. We ended up with an entire room full of Oompa Loompas floating around like great fat snowflakes!"

Sirius had gathered from Charlie's previous stories that Oompa Loompas were rather like goblins who favoured chocolate instead of gold -- leave it to the bloody Yanks to give ordinary people some ridiculous-sounding name -- and the image of several scowling, frost-covered Gringotts clerks floating through the chocolate factory filled his mind.

Laughing, Sirius asked, "What were the Levitating Limes supposed to do?"

"Oh, those were wonderful, too," Charlie said. "I came up with the idea for those in a dream one night. It was a splendid dream. I went to sleep wondering how I could keep an eye on the entire river valley at one time--"

Somewhere high above, in the distant reaches of the factory, there was a long, low _sigh_.

Charlie's voice faltered for a moment. Then he went on, "The entire valley...I wanted to see the entire valley at one time, to keep an eye on things. So I dreamed that I was floating up near the ceiling, as easy as a dandelion on the breeze, and when I woke up I knew I had to invent the Levitating Limes. It wasn't very hard, I just had to mix the important ingredients from the Light As Air Liquorice with--"

There was a faint, rumbling _roar_ beneath their feet, like a machine springing to life somewhere in the basement.

Charlie stopped walking. "Light As Air Liquorice..."

A gentle, indistinct _thrumming_ filled the air. The branches of the candy trees trembled.

"Light As Air..." Charlie's voice was soft, frightened.

Pipes overhead _creaked_.

"Mix it with what?" Sirius asked, looking around urgently. "What did you mix it with?"

A _whoosh_ of air flowed through the river tunnel at the other end of the valley.

"With...with the bounce from the Bouncing Banana Bars..." Charlie spoke absently, as if he barely heard Sirius. "With the bounce...It was just a silly idea. Never mind..."

The _roar_ beneath them began to fade.

"No!" Sirius grasped Charlie's arm. "Not a silly idea at all. Did it work? When you mixed them together, did it work?"

Charlie looked down at the hand on his arm, then met Sirius' eyes with a bewildered expression. "Of course it worked," he said, the dreamy confusion suddenly gone from his voice. "Not at first, you see, because when we flavoured it with lime it began to turn everyone green. But that gave us another idea, one we never quite finished, but it was a good one--"

Another steady _roar_ below, and a gentle _chugging_ started in the walls.

The two men looked at each other, then looked up at the ceiling.

The pipes overhead, long since still and coated with dried chocolate, were different. They were -- no, something _inside_ the pipes was moving. Flowing.

"What's happening?" Charlie whispered.

Sirius swallowed. "I think -- I think it's waking up."

Charlie's eyes widened. "Why now? What did we do?"

Sirius did not answer immediately. He listened, turning in a slow circle to watch the entire river valley. The faint lights in the walls brightened, just barely, but enough to lighten the room. There was gurgling and gasping in the pipes, clanking in hidden gears, sparking in invisible wires, and a low, steady humming all around.

"What was your other idea?" he asked.

Charlie stared at him. "What?"

"The other idea! What was the other idea that you got, from turning green?"

The only man continued to stare for a moment, then his mouth fell open slightly, and understanding dawned across his face. "_Oh_," he whispered, casting his gaze around almost reverently. Then, in a loud, strong voice, he said, "Colourful Cremes. That was the idea. To do what the Levitating Limes did on accident, on purpose -- change your skin colour or hair colour, making you blue or purple or green for a few minutes..._Look!_"

Sirius saw it at the same moment Charlie did. In the river bed, their footprints were softening, fading, vanishing. Chocolate was flowing into the depressions. They both turned toward the waterfall at the same moment. A tiny stream, no more than a trickle, was working it's way down the solid chocolate cliff.

"What else?" Sirius asked, shaking Charlie. "What else? What else did you want to invent?"

"I -- I don't -- I can't remember..." Charlie looked around wildly. "I don't know..."

For one brief, panicked moment, Sirius thought that the factory was falling quiet again.

Then Charlie straightened his shoulders. "Chomping Chocolate. A chocolate bar that would give you fangs like a vampire. Opera Creams, _real_ Opera Creams, which would let you sing an aria after you eat them. And...and..."

"Praline Paper," Sirius said quickly, stepping away from Charlie and speaking loudly, clearly, certain that the factory was listening. "Paper that you can eat, for passing notes in class."

"Peppermint Pencils, so it doesn't taste like ink!" Charlie shouted, turning in a circle, his arms spread wide.

"Dancing Divinity!"

"With different flavours for tap-dancing and ballet and jazz and swing!"

"Tickling Truffles, so you can't stop laughing!"

"Gabbing Gumdrops, so you can't stop talking!"

"Cartwheeling Caramels!"

"And a whole line of new chocolates!" Charlie exclaimed. "Dark chocolates, light chocolates, medium chocolates, with nuts and raisins and cherries and caramel and mint! A chocolate for every day of the year, and two different kinds for Sundays and holidays!"

The stream of liquid chocolate trickling down the fall grew larger, and chunks of solid chocolate began to fall into the river. Their footprints were almost completely invisible now. All along the banks of the river, the bushes and trees rustled, and below their feet the grass crackled. Sirius blinked in surprise; the brown, stiff crystalline blades seemed to be softening before his eyes, and fading into a lighter, almost-green colour. Around them, from every direction, the air was filled with the sound of machines humming and thrumming and chugging deep in the factory.

"It's working," Charlie said, his voice low with awe. "It's waking up."

-

The doors at the front of the factory were wide open.

Charlie and Sirius stood side-by-side in the doorway, looking into the empty yard.

"It's summer," Charlie said. "I didn't know it was summer."

Sirius didn't reply. He wondered how long he had been in the factory. The air outside was thick and humid, filled with the petrol scent of a city. Old newspapers and other trash was scattered along the wall around the factory, and over the hum and roar of the factory behind them, he could hear the sound of Muggle cars in the distance. He stepped out of the factory, squinting in the bright afternoon sunlight.

Then he glanced back. Charlie hesitated in the doorway, then took one small step forward. His face broke into a wide grin, and he stepped forward again.

"Well," he said quietly, looking down at his feet. "How about that." He looked up at Sirius, and his smile faded. "You're very good at inventing candy," he said, "but I won't ask you to stay."

Sirius shook his head. "I can't. I have to -- there's somebody who needs my help." He looked around the empty yard, at the wind tossing the discarded papers, then glanced back at the long corridor inside the factory. "A boy who's never had the chance to be a boy," he added, almost to himself.

"It's a very long way to England from here," Charlie said apologetically.

"Maybe that door will open, too," Sirius replied.

"We won't know unless we try it!"

Though Charlie's voice was filled with enthusiasm, Sirius could hear the hesitation in it. They walked back into the factory -- the doors did not close behind them -- and made there way through the maze of corridors to the door marked FORBIDDEN. They both stopped. Sirius reached out and put his hand on the doorknob.

"What will you do?" he asked Charlie, suddenly feeling both anxious and guilty. He didn't want to leave Charlie alone again, even though the factory was alive, the river was flowing, and the valley was coming to life. But he knew he could not stay.

"Oh, perhaps..." Charlie began, shrugging. "Perhaps...after I clean the place up a bit, and everything is working again...perhaps I'll have another contest, for children who like candy. I can find someone to help me run the factory, like he did -- I won't live forever, you know. And we'll need -- I'll need somebody with fresh ideas. Children have the best ideas."

The factory clanked and hummed in agreement.

The old man began to smile.

Sirius smiled, too, and turned the handle. The door swung open. Beyond, there was nothing but darkness and a cool, faint, whispering breeze.

"That's a good idea," Sirius said awkwardly. "You'll find somebody. Good luck."

Charlie Bucket replied, "Thank you." Then, as if remembering something, he gasped. "Oh! I nearly forgot. Here, take these." He reached into the pocket of his jacket and brought out a handful of Wonka Chocolate Bars. "Wouldn't want you to go away empty-handed, after all."

With a grin, Sirius took the chocolate bars, slipped them into a pocket in his robes, and stepped through the doorway.


End file.
